This is something of a major concern to me. When not if, the net is taken over by the .gov how will we get real news and information? One thing I have been working on is setting up the old bbs system. For those of you that are not pre-internet, bbs's were landline, or t-1, based systems that specialized in a varity of topics. I ran a multiline WildCat system in the late 80's and early 90's called the Night Hawk, deicated to the old Tradewars game. My platform was and old 8088 highly customized XT with 4 hard drives and 4 modems! Now as long as cell and landlines are up. that is one way we can stay in touch. The new version of Wild Cat is a little different from the old model and I have been setting it up, tweaking and building and setting up security so as to keep out htose that do not belong. That's one way. Now my background is with boats, large yachts to be exact as I was a private captain for many years and a commerical fisher before that. I traveled mainly out of the country and the only to get in touch back home or other boats was thru ssb/ham sets. As the years rolled by, e-mail and net access, through a laptop and a Praxtor moden was the main connection. If we could get some of the Hams out there to join in, we could set up a network of our own and expand it to include the rest of preppers either by relays or leap frogging.